Jaime B's Blog

Note: This has been sitting as a draft unposted since February 2014. I just discovered that I never actually posted it!

OK, so I decided to switch horses in the middle of the stream; I'll start over.

It's been over two years since I last posted to my blog, or since I've spent much time on Basenotes, for that matter. The reasons for that are a little bit involved, and I don't want to say too much about that in this blog entry. Maybe I'll save most of it for another one later
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Luca Turin has had quite a run, first surfacing as a popular writer on scents with two books, The Secret of Scent (2006) and the Perfumes: The A-Z Guide (2008). He had already become a familiar name to some through Chandler Burr’s book The Emperor of Scent (2002), which contained the first account of his theory of olfaction. After a bit of a gap, The Little Book of Scents came out in 2011; finally, we saw a collection of Folio Columns 2003 to 2014, which appeared in 2015 .

Translation is at best a difficult and dissatisfying, often even frustrating, task; yet I feel drawn to try my hand at it from time to time.

This is a poem of Paul Verlaine, he of the sad and broken love affair and infatuation with the younger poet, his sometime admirer Arthur Rimbaud. The poem was also the inspiration for Claude Debussy's orchestral rendering in his piece of the same name, part of his Suite Bergamasque.

A friend of mine was on a fight to Dubai recently and noticed one of the cabin crew was wearing a name tag with the same family name on it as mine. He took the man's picture and emailed it to me remarking on the strange coincidence. Of course, the flight attendant was from the same part of Spain, Galicia, as my parents, but it led me to think about some things I hadn't considered for a long time.